cartel that has previously done cartel things continues to do more cartel things
more at 11
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Technology
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The Memory Cartel: we can give you that feeling of childhood wonder, or, erase those embarrassing things keeping you awake at night. Or... we can make your enemies remember things that will haunt them forever... for a price.
OR:
The Ram Cartel: leather, bears, tops, chains and spikes, their safe word is 'disestablishmentarianism'
I've avoided updating my computer for years over one overpriced component of another. GPU and now DRAM.
Same. And with my computer not being windows 11 compatible it gave me the push to get rid of my windows partition all together. The tech industry is very good at making their products as unappealing as possible.
Same. Built my box 10 years ago next summer and she’s still clinging to life. One day I’ll be able to upgrade… maybe.
Still working on my backlog of 10 year old games...
There's only a handful of games worth playing that a 10 year old mid-range computer can't play anyway. I don't see the point of upgrading for Indianna Jones or COD.
Now is the time to buy a graphics card at or below MSRP before the ram prices spike them back up.
For example, OpenAI's new "Stargate" project reportedly signed deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month to feed its AI clusters, which is an amount close to 40% of total global DRAM output if it's ever met. That's an absurd amount of DRAM.
Will these even be useful on the second hand market, or are these chips gonna be on specialized PCBs for these machines?
Will these ever be useful on the second hand market
Nope, not ever. Even if it's standard form factor gear.
They will be disposed of ("recycled"), since that grants the largest asset depreciation tax break, and is the easiest economically. The grand majority of all data center gear gets trashed instead of reused or repurposed through the second hand market.
Source: I used to work at a hardware recycling facility, where much of the perfectly good hardware was required to be shredded, down to the components, because of these stipulations. It's such a waste.
Dumping bucket of tens of TB worth of modern RAM into a shredder is.... Infuriating.
That's really disheartening. Not because of my want for cheap RAM, but for the sheer waste of it all.
That's just how electronics recycling is, though. The amount of labor it would take to save all those SMT and BGA components is ridiculous and, honestly, is a pretty specialized skill even if it is easy to learn. The logistics of scale really makes it unreasonable, especially when simpler components can be had for literal pennies. There's a point where the material cost of the copper is worth more than the labor it takes to do anything else with the board, and it happens a lot sooner than you think.
The amount of Labor that would go into it it really isn't that high.
This is what distribution is for.
The company that owns the hardware is not the company that recycles it. The recycler can make a profit by reselling these components, they're not allowed to.
Many of these components still have to be pulled out so that labor cost is already a wash. The additional labor cost of testing, selling, packaging, and shipping is baked into the price in the secondary market.
Not everything is worth being resold, but many things are and those things are often not allowed to be resold due to destruction contracts.
I think when the economics of destroying a thing is better than reusing a thing, we should maybe have some sort of incentives toward reuse.
I get that the logistics of setting up what's basically a secondary supply chain is difficult, but I've got to believe it would be for the better.
I get that the logistics of setting up what’s basically a secondary supply chain is difficult, but I’ve got to believe it would be for the better.
hear me out: an org that guaranteed destruction of any residual data and ensured that no component or resource was wasted, was responsible nationwide for the collection of all e-waste into resource streams OR repair for reuse.
I'm just saying, techpriests might make me reevaluate my views on organized religion.
Likely not. This is a spectacularly dumb move, the product isn't that good and Samsung / SK Hynix are high if they think they they'll get paid if the market so much as sneezes and things go sideways
The NAND market is an effective monopoly that has been caught price fixing in the past. They desperately want to keep prices as high as they can so they tightly control supply to prevent having any excess product. This screws everyone over as soon as there's a spike in demand that they failed to account for.
Instead of just keeping a consistent supply and allowing prices to drop from competition, we end up with a price rollercoaster that peaks every few years then crashes back down again. The severity is just higher than usual due to the higher demand from data centers.
The market desperately needs a new player that just consistently creates supply instead of playing stupid games, but the barrier to entry is too high.
What's spiking is everything needed to run a AI datacenter, in order. First they spiked the price of GPUs, then the very instant that started to cool DRAM spiked. Electricity itself looks very much like it might be next, and we'll be on to water before too long.
The reason why is greed. That's the only reason for capitalism.
Just built a rig to give me enough raw power I move however I need yo when this all blows up. Went with a Ryzen 5000 series cpu and ddr4 ram and a godawful motherboard with an Intel B580 cpu. It’s cheap but I now have more options.
Too bad I couldn’t get the opnsense VM working properly so I’m stuck with keeping the firewalla running. But that may not matter as the Nazis want to kill the internet anyway. We may be forced to rely on wonky mixnets like reticulum.